Gonzalez v. Sanchez et al

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WO
IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF ARIZONA
Robert Gonzalez,
Plaintiff,
v.
Raul Sanchez, et al.,
Defendants.
No. CV-25-01737-PHX-ROS
ORDER
Plaintiff Robert Gonzales works as a Correctional officer with the Arizona
Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry (“ADCRR”) at the Yuma State
Prison Complex in San Luis, Arizona. (Doc. 18 at 2). Defendants Sanchez and Bonilla are
police officers employed by ADCRR and Defendants Bonillas and Hau are employed in
the ADCRR Special Services Unit (“SSU”). Plaintiff alleges Defendants, acting under
color of state law, violated his constitutional rights when they detained him and conducted
searches of his vehicle and home; Plaintiff brings claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Defendants seek dismissal of all claims as alleged in the First Amended Complaint
(“FAC”) pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6).1 (Doc. 19, “Motion”).
I. Background
As alleged in the FAC, on April 7, 2025, just before 6 a.m., Plaintiff arrived at work
at the Yuma State Prison Complex in San Luis. Before he went through the metal detector
1 Defendants also cite Rule 12(b)(1), which provides for dismissal of a complaint for lack
of subject matter jurisdiction. Defendants fail to address this in any way, leading the Court
to conclude that its inclusion in the Motion was an oversight.
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to enter the prison, Defendants Sanchez and Bonilla, ADCRR criminal investigators, seized
and handcuffed Plaintiff and informed him they had a warrant for his phone, his vehicle,
and his home. The warrant was obtained two days earlier based upon an affidavit Defendant
Sanchez completed stating that he had heard from inmates that Plaintiff was involved in
money laundering and the transportation of drugs and contraband into the prison. The
warrant application stated that Plaintiff worked in the prison, and Plaintiff’s girlfriend,
Jenesis Murillo, was his emergency contact and the emergency contact of her brother, an
inmate at the prison where Plaintiff worked. Plaintiff alleges that Defendant Sanchez
“falsely represented” he had observed Jenesis and her brother “utilizing codes discussing
large amounts of monetary transactions and business pertaining to the introduction of
narcotics.” (Doc. 18 ¶28).
After seizing Plaintiff’s phone and searching the vehicle, Defendants Sanchez and
Bonilla instructed Defendants Bonillas and Hau to take custody of plaintiff. Defendants
Bonillas and Hau placed Plaintiff in the back of an ADCRR vehicle and drove him to a
Carl’s Jr. parking lot, where they kept him detained while Defendants Sanchez and Bonilla
searched the addresses listed on the warrant. The addresses were for Plaintiff and his
girlfriend’s parents’ homes, and Plaintiff informed Defendants that he and Jenesis resided
at an entirely different address
II. Failure to Meet and Confer
Defendant’s Motion (Doc. 19) and Plaintiff’s Response (Doc. 21) establish the
undisputed facts surrounding the filing of the Motion to Dismiss. After 5:00p.m. on August
12, 2025, Defendants sent an email to Plaintiff’s Counsel “asking to confer on a proposed
motion to dismiss,” (Doc. 21), On August 12, 2025, Defendants filed this Motion, along
with a Good Faith Consultation Certificate that stated:
“Counsel for Defendants Raul Sanchez, Jesus Bonilla, Oscar
Bonillas, and Eric Hau, (“State Defendants”), pursuant to
Local rule 12.1(c), certifies that on August 12, 2025, he
conferred with Plaintiff’s counsel, via email, and outlined
State Defendants’ defenses to Plaintiff’s First Amended
Complaint. Plaintiff’s counsel did not respond to the email.
Plaintiff and State Defendants have fundamental differences on
the legal issues necessitating the filing of State Defendants’
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Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff’s First Amended Complaint.”
(Doc. 20) (emphasis added). Local Rule 12.1(c) provides no motions “pursuant to Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) …will be considered or decided unless the movant
notified the opposing party of the issues asserted in the motion and the parties were unable
to agree that the pleading was curable in any part by a permissible amendment offered by
the pleading party.” L.R. 12.1(c) (emphasis added). Rule 12(b)(6) motions that do not
comply with this requirement “may be stricken summarily.” (Id.) Counsel for both parties
were additionally made aware of this requirement in the Court’s May 22, 2025, Order
stating, “preliminary motions aimed at the pleadings are discouraged if the defect can be
cured by filing an amended pleading…motions to dismiss pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P.
12(b)(6)…must contain a certification of conferral indicating the parties have conferred
to determine whether an amendment could cure the deficient pleading but have been unable
to agree the pleading is curable by a permissible amendment.” (Doc. 6) (emphasis added).
Motions not in compliance “are subject to be stricken on the Court’s motion.” (Id.).
Plaintiffs argue the Motion should be stricken because “Defendants failed to meet
and confer in good faith” and “never gave Plaintiff’s counsel a meaningful opportunity to
actually meet and confer.” (Doc. 21 at 2).
Defendants reply, “Counsel for State Defendants did comply with this Court’s May
22, 2025, Order…State Defendants did not know that Plaintiff’s counsel would not consult
his email before the motion was filed.” Defendants further argue “in any event, based on
Plaintiff’s Response here, it is apparent that Plaintiff would not have dismissed his
Amended Complaint or amended it to withdraw any of his claims.” Finally, Defendants
assert “Plaintiff is suing four law enforcement officers for executing a warrant that was
signed by a neutral and detached magistrate on the conclusory plea that the warrant was
obtained through deception. Based on the circumstances and the Amended Complaint
allegations, a motion to dismiss is warranted.” (Doc. 22).
By Defendants’ apparent argument that Plaintiff’s Response to the motion renders
the requirement moot, Defendants appear to believe that motion practice is an acceptable
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substitute for a meet and confer requirement. And implicitly, Defendants appear to argue,
citing no authority, that where the undisputed facts are (1) the four defendants are “law
enforcement officers, (2) a detached, neutral magistrate signed the warrant, and (3)
Plaintiff’s allegations of deception are “conclusory,” a meet and confer in accordance with
Local Rule 12.1(c) is never required. Such an argument is so extraordinary it is not worthy
of a response. The Court’s docket is not a venue for individual communication between
parties.
Defense counsel is reminded the core of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure is the
fundamental rule that the parties do not engage in a needless consumption of time. Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 1 states in part: “These rules govern the procedure in all civil
actions . . . to secure the just, speedy and inexpensive determination.” This rule was further
elucidated in the 2015 Amendments Advisory Notes that “most lawyers cooperate to
achieve these ends. But discussions . . . regularly include pleas to discourage over-use,
misuse, and abuse of procedural tools that increase cost and result in delay. Effective
advocacy is consistent with—and indeed depends upon—cooperative and proportional use
of procedure.”
The Rules of Practice and Procedure of the District Court of Arizona were created
and adopted for the same reasons and goals. See, e.g., Wine Education Counsel v. Arizona
Rangers, 2020 WL 7352632 (“the District of Arizona has promulgated Local Rule of Civil
Procedure 12.1(c) in an effort to promote communication and attempted resolution by
opposing counsel prior to parties filing motions to dismiss”); Puckett v. United States, 704
F.Supp.3d 998, 1002 (noting the goal of Local Rule 56.1 is to “simplif[y] theprocess” and
criticizing Plaintiff’s violation of the rule because it “hinders the effective resolution of
[the] Motion.”). Rule 12.1(c) reads unambiguously that an attorney who proposes to file a
motion to dismiss is prohibited from filing it unless and until he or she engages opposing
counsel and they were “unable to agree that the pleading was curable.” There is no good
faith interpretation of this rule that excuses a movant altogether from voice to voice, face
to face, email to email, formal or other informal communication with opposing counsel
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about the merits of the motion. Further, there is no exception for emergencies, which would
clearly be inapplicable here. What is readily apparent is that an after-hours email sent less
than twenty-four hours before filing a Motion does not constitute good faith attempt to
meet, confer, and resolve potential issues.
Defendants did not substantively comply with Local Rule 12.1(c) or the Court’s
May 22, 2025, Order. The Court will summarily deny the Motion to Dismiss on this
ground. However, as discussed below, the Motion would be denied even if it were not so
barred.
III. Motion to Dismiss
A complaint must contain a “short and plain statement of the claim showing that the
pleader is entitled to relief.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(a)(2). “To survive a motion to dismiss, a
complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to ‘state a claim to relief
that is plausible on its face.’” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (quoting Bell Atl.
Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007) (internal citations omitted)). If “the well-
pleaded facts do not permit the court to infer more than the mere possibility of misconduct,
the complaint” has not adequately shown the pleader is entitled to relief. Id. at 679. Federal
courts ruling on a motion to dismiss “must take all of the factual allegations in the
complaint as true,” but they “are not bound to accept as true a legal conclusion couched as
a factual allegation.” Id. at 678 (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 555) (internal quotations
omitted).
Plaintiff’s Amended Complaint alleges civil rights violations under 42 U.S.C. §
1983, judicial deception, and false arrest or imprisonment under state law. Defendant
moves to Dismiss these claims “on the grounds that (1) State Defendants’ search warrant
affidavit is supported by probable cause, (2) the Justice Court issued a valid search warrant,
(3) State Defendants had probable cause to detain Plaintiff, and (4) Plaintiff failed to plead
facts for a judicial deception claim.” (Doc. 19 at 1).
“The elements of an action under Section 1983 are (1) the denial under color of state
law (2) of a right secured by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Smith v.
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Cremins, 308 F.2d 187, 190 (9th Cir. 1962). Whether Defendants acted under color of state
law is not in dispute. Plaintiff alleges defendants investigated for only three days prior to
obtaining the warrant, finding no evidence of wrongdoing by Plaintiff, and sought the
warrant based on information from unnamed inmate informants and the fact that Plaintiff’s
girlfriend was the emergency contact for both Plaintiff and her brother. Furthermore,
Plaintiff alleges Defendant Sanchez made false representations to support his warrant
application. These facts, taken as true, can support the plausible inferences that Defendants
obtained a warrant based on judicial deception and detained Plaintiff without probable
cause.
Plaintiff alleges despite his informing Defendants of their mistake regarding his
address, they kept him handcuffed in the vehicle for six hours while they searched the
residences and, only after that, extracted his consent to search his home rather than being
forced to remain handcuffed in the vehicle for four more hours. These facts as alleged can
support the plausible inference that the circumstances were sufficiently coercive to render
Plaintiff’s consent to search involuntary. On a Motion to Dismiss, all facts alleged in the
Complaint are assumed true and all reasonable inferences at made in Plaintiff’s favor.
Defendants do not attempt to show that these facts, if true, would not state a claim
for the denial of Plaintiff’s constitutional rights but rather offer other facts, whether
admissible or not, to support their interpretation of the facts by arguing that the warrant
affidavit did not contain false representations, the warrant was supported by probable
cause, and the circumstances of Plaintiff’s detention and consent to search did not
constitute coercion. Defendants argue the merits and are inappropriate at the Motion to
Dismiss stage. Plaintiff is not required to prove his claims on a Motion to Dismiss.
Assuming the truth of the facts as alleged and viewing them in the light most favorable to
Plaintiff, the facts are sufficient to support a plausible claim for relief.
Accordingly,
…
…
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IT IS ORDERED the Motion to Dismiss (Doc. 19) is DENIED.
Dated this 9th day of February, 2026.
Honorable Roslyn O. Silver
Senior United States District Judge
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